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Brendan Gleeson, Sam Elliott & 11 Year-Old 'America's Got Talent' Finalist Jackie Evancho Round Out CastThe way it probably works with Robert Redford is that he calls you up, says he wants you for his movie and then you just ask when and where to show up. Quickly following up his musty Abe Lincoln assassination legal drama "The Conspirator," Redford is going behind the camera for the thriller "The Company You Keep." It will also mark his first onscreen appearance since 2007's "Lions For Lambs," and yes, this one has a political backbone to it as well.

Listen, we get it. It's far easier for studios to develop spinoffs, sequels and prequels based on pre-existing characters and franchises rather than (god forbid) throwing money behind original, new ideas. But even with that knowledge, Hollywood can still surprise us as Deadline reports that Universal is getting a sequel to the 1999 Taye Diggs comedy "The Best Man" underway. Yeah, we don't remember that movie either and we're not sure anybody is asking for new one, but whatever, right?

She's back! According to TV Line, Anika Noni Rose will reprise her role as Wendy Scott-Carr in an upcoming episode of CBS The Good Wife. In the last season of the show, Anika's character ran up against Peter (played by Chris Noth) for the State's Attorney job.

While movies are primarily considered a form of entertainment, they do have the ability to inform, especially to a mass audience. But that’s a slippery slope. All too easily, the audience can be taken right out of the story if things get too didactic. We at the secret Playlist headquarters (which is, naturally, surrounded by a piranha-filled moat where we toss in haters of the movie “Drive”) tend to like our cinema focused more on organic storytelling, not issue-driven diatribes.

The very impressive traveling collection 30 Americans by the Rubell Family Collection in Miami; features the work of some of the most prominent 31 African Americans artists in the last three decades. This exhibition focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture while exploring the powerful influence of artistic legacy and community across generations.

We have to admit, the opening moments of this trailer had us worried with the ominous BRAAAAHM sound design and initial footage looking like "Rise Of The Inception Battle For Transformers In Los Angeles" but once it settles in, the first full trailer for "The Avengers" makes it look like the film will deliver the goods.

Like Claire Denis’s recent White Material, Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness, which earned a Silver Bear for directing at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, is something of a postcolonial Heart of Darkness, a complex and at times allegorical portrait of Europeans living in Africa. On the surface, at least, Köhler’s film appears more grounded in realism than Denis’s delirious terror, focusing on the twinned stories of two doctors: Eddo Velten (Pierre Bokma), who oversees a program to combat African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, in rural Cameroon, and Alex Nzila (Jean-Christophe Folly), the Congo-born Parisian who’s sent to investigate his progress. Köhler is also more explicitly interested in the broader structure of international aid, addressing, and perhaps indicting, an entire system that, while it successfully treats and contains the outbreak of infectious illness, also breeds other types of maladies: corruption, exploitation, and the continued economic and political imbalance between the two regions. Sleeping Sickness, however, refrains from an activist viewpoint and describes instead an entrenched bureaucratic and moral morass that’s as murky as its hippo-infested waters. Read Genevieve Yue's review of Sleeping Sickness.

Just a few days ago, the forthcoming reboot/new vision on "Dredd" became the subject of some ugly advance word. Reports surfaced that director Pete Travis was effectively being locked out of the editing bay, that reshoots were possibly in the works and most surprising of all, that writer Alex Garland ("Sunshine," "28 Days Later") was leading the charge behind the closed doors to get the film put together and was even going to see a co-director credit for his effort. The news was dispiriting for a film that promised fanboys an R-rated gritty take on the hero, but in a statement to 24 Frames released by Garland and Travis, they say everything is fine, without addressing any of the specifics surrounding the post-production of the movie at all:

The Confessions of Steve McQueen is an interestingly shot documentary syle video of British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen directed by Alison Chernick of Nowness.com. In it, McQueen discusses the inspiration and themes of his latest sex addiction drama Shame.